A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida by N. D. B. Connolly (review)

The “concrete” in N. D. B. Connolly’s history of real estate and race in twentieth-century South Florida is both metaphorical and literal. Metaphorical, because his is a story of hardening racial segregation as American cities moved from the regime of Jim Crow to the era of the civil rights movement. Literal, because Connolly shows us that this hardening happened not only in terms of social practices and legal and extralegal means but also in the built environment itself. Miami’s residents of color—particularly African Americans—had inhabited a world in which their oppression and exploitation were materialized in the decrepit wooden shotgun houses that were the only housing available to many of them. In the postwar period, public officials, developers, landlords, and others joined to redevelop these homes—and the racial order they represented—in a more durable material. The resulting two- and three-story “concrete monsters” (185) joined concrete walls and concrete highways to reinforce and expand the spatial differentiation of race already well under way. In becoming “a world more concrete,” Miami also became one in which the barriers of race were ever more difficult to transcend.

At the heart of Connolly’s book is something as ubiquitous in the American city as concrete: the buying, holding, and selling of land. Indeed, in the region of the United States that has arguably been most closely associated with the pursuit of real estate, commoditized land facilitated more than vocations and vacations: real estate, Connolly writes, “served as one of the chief vehicles for the development and continuance of anti-black racism” (6). When conceived as capital, real estate drove battles over the value of land, land use, redevelopment, and ownership. Likewise, real estate shaped conceptions of citizenship, rights, and governance. People of color, especially renters who could not buy into the American game of property acquisition, were typically on the losing side of these battles. And the costs imposed upon them were about more than a lack of access to the wealth creation or autonomy that ownership promised; they were about the perpetuation of a system of racial apartheid that at every turn limited African Americans spatially, socially, and politically.

In describing the concretization of this system, Connolly contributes a new regional chapter to the story of the transition from the first to the second ghetto.¹ But he does much more than that. By using the lens of real estate, he makes a compelling and much broader case that the inscription of racial lines in American cities like Miami was not exceptional in its personnel, strategies, or outcomes. In fact, Miami’s story was clearly unexceptional—so mundane and unremarkable that it led to a regime of segregation that was pervasive yet largely unnoticed.

Connolly is a skilled and perceptive guide, pulling back the curtain on a cast of overlooked characters who produced this landscape not through grandiose crusades but by their everyday interactions with real estate. Chief among these were landlords and their various confederates, including rent collectors and property managers. Connolly puts landlords at the center of the spatial and racial evolution of the American city in the twentieth century. At times they represented a common enemy: the target of officials and reformers who called for disruptive redevelopment under the cover of fighting exploitive landlords. But frequently they were in the driver’s seat, allying with African American tenants to resist such demolition or supporting residential “modernization” when it yielded private housing from which they could further benefit. At the heart of landlords’ motivation, of course, was the value they saw in a Jim Crow landscape that was tremendously lucrative for them. Using the language of property rights and a selective embrace of public policy, they...